This page was updated 11/19/2007

O God who is our vision of the Good and the True, of happiness and safety,

Help us be more aware of the evil about us, and courageous before it.

We are easily intimidated by the vast forces in the modern world:

How can we be a moral agent today? How can we stop large-scale evil?

Give us the strength to persevere. Give us the wisdom to prepare our minds.

Give us the courage to vote, to protest, and to act for good.

Our petty mistakes, foolish actions, and personal weaknesses give us pause;

We ask, Who is perfect? and know we cannot answer with our names.

Yet we are not evil for this, nor are we excused from doing our part.

May we find forgiveness and mercy in our hearts, for this can stop some evils.

May we care for one another, and show compassion to those who feel lost.

And, when times demand, may we do our duty in the face of danger,

Not because we are perfect, but because we are humans,

And we have a dream—a dream of a better world, a safer world.

Let us follow our values and our hopes with meaningful actions. AMEN.

I know, you were expecting stories, perhaps of my college days. For it is true that I have known evil, and I have done wrong. But, like most ministers, I think, compared to your stories, mind would be boring indeed! I have no jokes today, either. Evil deserves a few jokes, but not today I fear.

Hannah Arendt’s conclusion after the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann shocked the world. Eichmann, an architect, designed the system of concentration camps and their support structure, earning him the title "the architect of the Final Solution." Under his direction, the elaborate system for collecting and killing Jews was constructed and maintained during the war.

Apparently he was a mild man, physically ill after his only visit to see his work. He was no Goebbels or Megele, no fanatic, not accused of being part of Hitler’s inner circle. He was just doing his job, efficiently and effectively. That forced the philosopher Arendt to conclude that although not an evil person, he was an integral part of the century’s greatest evil. Neiman:

Though few books are apt to draw more fire than Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, few conclusions are in fact more widely accepted. For what Arendt meant in saying that evil may be banal was simply that it need not be demonic. After Auschwitz, at the latest, we learned that the greatest crimes can be committed by people less likely to arouse terror and awe than contempt and disgust. Thoughtlessness can be more dangerous than malice; and we are more often threatened by self-serving refusal to see the consequences of conventional actions than by defiant desires for destruction. [xii] repeat last sentence

Arendt was attacked because she made this point: we do not have to be Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Genghis Khan slaughtering men, women, and children, or religious fanatics to be evil. In fact, unimaginable evil is perpetrated by faceless bureaucrats, sloppy workers at Chernobyl, an Exxon ship’s captain, clerks like who ran the Berlin office of the concentration camps, or scientists who labored in basement labs to design the atom bomb.

In the modern world, unlike the ancient world, we no longer need to face others in battle to kill them. We have structures of evil in our society that can, with cold efficiency and ruthless effectiveness, kill, maim, and harm the souls of millions of people—and no one in particular is to blame! We do not have to go overseas for examples: think of segregation (lynchings and psychological torture) in this country for most of the Twentieth Century.

Susan Neiman wrote a new review of modern philosophy’s take on evil. She begins with the great earthquake of 1755 in Lisbon, Portugal. She wrote: "The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today." It was a shorthand word for great evil, unimaginable in scope and destructive of more than physical reality: it destroyed the old ways of thinking about evil. The earthquake killed many people and destroyed the fine buildings in town. The resulting fires killed people in the streets, afraid to go back in the buildings. Then the tsunami caused by the quake killed thousands who had taken refuge on ships in the harbor. Lisbon was a major center of commerce and learning at that time, and the Portuguese empire (think Brazil and ports in Africa) never recovered.

Their liberal King, Alfonso, quickly stepped in and managed an impressive recovery and rebuilding effort. If he hadn’t been so outspoken, things might have gone better for him. Like so many others after the quake, the King was not impressed by God’s work, nor the Church’s efforts to blame the liberal Portuguese for the evil that befell them. The Church required this to be the best of all possible worlds since the God had created it. The Lisbon tragedy, then, had to be the fault of the Portuguese, a response to great evil.

This is the reason Jean Jacques Rousseau coined the phrase "the best of all possible worlds". He was trying to defend God against those who believed that the residents of Lisbon were not the cause of the earthquake. It was a natural event; the people did not cause it by their apostasy. In those days moral evil and natural evil were directly related. The next hundred years in philosophy debated this question, until Immanuel Kant all but put an end to the discussion, at least in philosophy. He concluded that science and reason proved that humans were not responsible for natural disasters. Natural events were not evil in the moral sense; natural disasters were not due to the moral failure of one or more people, a culture, or religious belief.

Since then, mainstream Christian thinkers have mostly agreed. It is difficult to argue with science on this, though television evangelist Pat Robertson did after a hurricane a few years ago. Moral evil has come to describe human actions, especially human agency: a person decides to do something that will harm others; "evil in the first degree" so to speak. But this raises some problems, for surely we are not always responsible; bad things happened that we did not intend or foresee.

Liberals accepted the new idea quickly, praising the individual who is responsible for personal actions. What the philosophers Arendt and Neiman propose is far more complex. We are not always responsible for evil, but we bear some responsibility for the structures of evil we help create and maintain, because we do not halt or destroy these structures. By "structures" I mean government agencies, ruthless corporations, patterns of bribery and fraud, deliberate failure to enforce laws and standards of practice, and other large scale, organized activities that harm people, nature, and our ideals.

Now we understand human misery: it is not caused by storms or earthquakes, but by our actions and inactions, our wisdom and stupidity.

What this means for us today is not simple. Without nature (and God) to blame, we are left with the thorniest problem yet to arise: how are we to understand human actions and decisions? It is far easier to understand God (or at least to pretend to), because He never responds one way or another to our statements. We can fall back on the defense of Job’s so-called friends: God’s ways are beyond our understanding. Humans, however, do respond, and they do so with an unbelievable (and unexplainable) inconsistency.

First, when bad things happen to us, that’s evil. When we do bad things to others, well, that’s justice. This view, fairly common among people of all cultures, religions, and politics, forgives us (even before the fact) for all we do. Our response to 9/11, for example, is not measured according to our own values and beliefs, but in accordance with the actions of the terrorists. For our own values would not condone our reactions! Yet, we know this is false, and we are anxious and feel guilty because of it. Dr. Neiman writes:

Surely the President’s speechwriters have posted in big letters: "They are evil; we are expedient, justified, righteous in our response." There is simply no rational defense against this argument. It works as effectively today as thousands of years ago, when clans and tribes sought revenge against other clans and tribes for doing to them what they were also doing.

Evil is more complex and difficult to describe today than in the past for the simple reason that our lives are more complex today. The old excuses failed under the light of science and reason. Today we have the excuse of German officials at the Nuremburg Trails following World War II: "I was just following orders." In ancient times that was enough. If captured, you might die, for mercy was a rare commodity, but that explained what you did to everyone’s satisfaction. Not today. We are too free to have use excuse.

If that is no excuse, how can we explain the failure of democracy to halt crime, violence, and hatred? One example that haunts our society is racism. Slavery officially ended 150 years ago, and nearly fifty years laws under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to end de facto segregation.

Despite the laws and the years, American blacks still suffer excessive rates of poverty and incarceration. There are structures of segregation that continue despite the end of personal segregation in our society. There are many names for these examples of the philosopher’s "sinister sort of symbiosis". Evil is more complex than the man on the street. Evil is encased in every structure of our society, like the heartless sale of subprime mortgages (not the mortgages themselves but the way they were marketed) and real estate and banking redlining. The waste and fraud after Hurricane Katrina are as and, and morally more offensive, than the lazy and complacent preparations for the hurricane were before it struck.

I urge you to put aside your complacency. There are structures of evil in our society, even in Fort Wayne. We will not build a better future for ourselves, our families, and the world with naïve efforts and shallow thinking. We may not eliminate poverty completely, but the number of poor, starving, ill-housed, uneducated children without health insurance is inexcusable. This is not your fault personally, nor is it any one person’s fault. It is our fault as a people, for we have settled for complacency and personal comfort, leaving peace and justice to wait for another day and more dedicated citizens.

Just because there is no Bogeyman or devil does not mean that we cannot find examples of evil all about us. Just because we live in America does not mean we are perfect moral persons. Indeed, our good fortune makes evil all the easier, for we have the education and sophistication to excuse our worst actions, while blaming others for out inactions. Our complacency is today the greatest source of evil, for it perpetuates structures of evil that are far more powerful than the despots and tyrants of old.

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